


Safe Returns

by Factoids



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 11:31:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4390193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Factoids/pseuds/Factoids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or Nothing is More Sad Than the Death of an Illusion</p><p>Because Starks sleep lightly, even in death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe Returns

She brings Robb’s bones from the Twins to be laid in the crypts at Winterfell. When they find their way back, Sansa, Rickon, and their host of Umber and Manderly men, there is no fight to be had. It smells of death and decay and smoke and the gates are barred but no one is in the keep or the grounds or the town. Men try to scale the walls to open the gates but they can barely stand to touch the cold stone and they fall to the ground clutching their heads long before they reach the top.

In the end Rickon scrambles up easily, Sansa following slower, but when they force the gates open only Shaggydog enters, bounding over and gnawing on a what must have once been an inhabitant of the keep and Sansa prays it was one the Boltons brought with them.

Their host approaches but then falls back, the ones that stride out in front fall to their knees and many faint dead away and Sansa motions for them to hold, set up camp, and then she follows Rickon into the keep.

It is Rickon that explains the shadows and the chill where the walls still run warm but the heat stays trapped in the stone. He tells her of the last days he spent in the keep, in the crypts. It is a vague memory full of half forgotten faces but he tells her about the swords. Osha took a sword, and Bran and the girl took swords, and Rickon took the others. He put them on the ground and only the boy noticed as Rickon darted from statue to statue.

Sansa kisses his hair and holds him close and laughs to herself because the betrayals against her brother were avenged by his five year old baby brother before any of them even knew that they had happened.

Sansa sends a silent thanks to her father’s gods as they enter the crypts that Brandon the Builder’s sword lies as a line of rusted flakes across his knees because she fears he would not be subdued into a gentle peace if he saw Winterfell as it stood.

Rickon is disinterested but helpful in the way he has been since they were reunited. Neither the bodies nor the ghosts that pervade what used to be their home seem to bother him but when Sansa asks it of him he calls Shaggy to him and sets off through hallways that never seemed so cavernous when she was a girl and brings back bones and bodies and piles that could be both or neither. Sansa walks out to the troops that she still considers Robb’s (she thinks they do the same), and asks them to gather wood for a pyre.

Mors Umber is almost at the gates, can see the growing pile of bodies, when his eyes slam shut and his hands fly to his ears and she bids him turn back before his legs give out but his horse can be gently coaxed through with the great sled of wood and kindling, darting back to his master as soon as she releases him each time.

Sansa has never built a pyre, has only rarely lit her own small fires, but Rickon piles the logs with ease and sets it to a steady burn. She helps toss body after body onto the pyre once Rickon deems that the flame has taken and will not be quashed and she appalls herself with the realization that the burning flesh smells like roasted meat to her.

It takes weeks, months, to go through the burial rites for all the fallen Stark lords and kings and she immerses herself in the rituals. She takes each sword out to Gendry who repairs and reforges them with new steel in the forge in Winter Town and she sits with Rickon and Shaggydog under the heart tree and polishes them carefully to a shine, softly repeating prayers for the spirits of their owners. She stands a vigil at each statue, three nights, when she has placed the gleaming sword across his lap or over his hands and watched his spirit settle into his tomb.

Eventually there is only Robb left and it tears at her because he has been beside her since she set his bones in their temporary home where his tomb was not yet built and she does not know that she can let him go. He is clearer than all the others, so vivid she can almost imagine he is still alive except for how he never speaks and he stares at her with much more sadness than her brother ever did.

She knows she must let him rest, that it is cruel to keep him with her, but it is so hard to imagine Winterfell without him and so easy to come up with excuses.

His tomb is not ready...

The craftsmen won’t enter the grounds yet...

His sword and crown are still lost, when the Mormonts find them and send them back…

She has not received word from his queen’s family and she would not have her laid to rest where her gods cannot see her...

No one is there to pull her from her little fantasy except Rickon who only cocks his head to the side in thought as Robb leads her around the floor of the great hall in a dance where they are a breath apart but never touch that she remembers visiting lords and ladies commenting on their elegance and poise over. She remembers beaming with pride.

Robb smiles when they dance and his eyes lose almost enough of their sadness that she can convince herself that she is not trapping her brother’s spirit with her. Robb watches her sing Rickon to sleep and he looks so heartbroken she cannot meet his eyes.

“You love him.” Rickon states as they break their fast. It occurs to her that Rickon does not know Robb. To him Robb is just another of the ghosts they have lived among for moons now. Brighter, sharper around the edges, but no closer to him than Edric Snowbeard who had been the first of her ancestors she laid to rest.

“I do.” _And so do you_ , her mind insists, _you just do not know him_. “He is our brother. Robb. He was king, just as you will be.” Rickon shrugs as he always does when Lord Manderly reminds him of his titles.

“And he loves you.” She wonders for a moment if she would prefer to feel as Rickon does. To have no real memory of those he has lost, but she remembers every dream of Robb saving her and she would not trade them for the dispassion Rickon views their world through.

“He loved us both, my love, very much. He went to war to protect us.”

“Will he leave you?” There is a stubborn tilt to his chin and a flash of anger in his eyes as he stabs at the dried and salted meat on his plate.

Robb is at her side again as she swallows tears and smiles softly at their youngest brother who looks so like Robb it hurts her some days but she will never tell him because he will never be someone’s replacement. “I have to let him rest, sweetling.”

“But you love him. He should stay. People shouldn’t leave.” Rickon doesn’t remember them leaving, but he does remember them having left.

“I know, my love, I know it hurts, but spirits do not belong among the living. Sometimes we have to let people go, even though we love them. But I have you, and I love you more than anything else in the world.”

“I won’t leave.” He says it and she believes him as much as she always believed father and Robb.

The day comes when all her excuses fall away.

Robb’s wife’s silently sleeping bones are laid under a great oak where flowers will cover her after winter passes and hers is a grand funeral because the bannermen still cannot bear to spend long in the shadows of Winterfell’s walls where their king lies, but their queen is not so unreachable.

His sword rests on the great chair that neither she nor Rickon will take before they must and his crown with it.

Men have delivered the stone likeness of her brother and his wolf and the great stone monstrosity that will hold his bones. The men who carried them down into the crypts suffered night-terrors, she knows, for days afterward.

She paints the unseeing marble eyes and sets his crown on his head, seated -like the kings of old- beyond where her father and uncle stand, and he looks grim and regal and every inch the king she imagined him.

Her tears fall on the blade of his sword as she polishes it, prayers spilling from her lips with every stroke as Rickon looks on doubtfully.

Lords and ladies and cavalrymen and knights stand a vigil for their king across the massive, sprawling camp, she knows this because she has told them he will be interred tonight, but in the crypts there is only herself and Rickon and she is glad because she is burying a Robb who was hers and they are mourning a king who was theirs.

Rickon takes her hands in his, already calloused and scarred at nine, when she forces herself to release the blade she has been clutching to the hold of her stone brother.

“I won’t leave.” 


End file.
